Remanufacturing Myself
Every school year, I try something different, something new, something that makes me work a little harder or brings new ideas to my classroom.
In the excitement of returning to my classroom after six weeks in India and the United Kingdom, I thought about ways to integrate my experience into my curriculum. I created a short, “getting-to-know-you” presentation with photos of my trip and the people I met. I wrote an article for our district newsletter. I modified my Language Arts curriculum to make it more suitable for English Language Learners at an advanced proficiency level.
No matter what, the focus in my classes remains on reading and writing skills. I talk about going to college as a goal (“college and career ready” in the jargon of our school’s mission statement), and mention the benefits of a technical education as well. Many of my students now ride the bus to a local technical school and return with stories of learning auto mechanics or becoming familiar with healthcare.
For me, my education has not stopped with my so-called “terminal degree” of a doctorate in educational leadership. I registered at the University of Vermont for a class in Comparative Slavery. Already, after two classes, I’m heavily involved in reading works by Orlando Patterson (Freedom and the Making of Western Culture, 1991; Slavery and Social Death, 1982) and planning a research paper (The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander posits that incarceration is the current form of slavery. I would like to connect these threads, following the thinking of Bryan Stevenson in Just Mercy [2014] and his work with the Equal Justice Initiative, the human rights organization he leads in Montgomery, Alabama. If nothing else, my dissertation prepared me for a life of research and academic reading.)
Then, today’s New York Times carried an article by Mary Laura Philpott about starting life over again in the fall (“I’m So Excited for 40th Grade”). Children arrive at their first classes with new shoes, backpacks, piercings, perhaps a new name acquired over the summer.
For